GMail is my most beloved email service. Not only because I get 1GB space for free but because it is extremely user-friendly. It is so nice that I do not even use POP access and always use it from the web.

Recently I have discovered one more very cool feature. I don\‘t know how long this feature has been around, maybe for a very long time, but I must admit I only now discovered it and  loved it. What I mean is hidden in the Settings under Accounts/Send E-Mail As and allows to send email as if it was sent from your another account… e.g. - your work email account?

This is quite important. Before, if I would forward some email to gmail, for the convenience of recieving it in one (and niceest) place, if then I wanted to reply to the message I had to go to the interface of the email address the message was recieved for. Otherwise, sender would be easily confused to recieve an answer to the email he sent to @umd.edu address, from address that is @gmail.com  - not something to do.

Now that you got reasonably excited with me, I have to warn that gmail does not send emails in a totally transparent way. Clients at the receiving end have more than enough information to understand that email was sent from this-and-this@foo.com but on behalf of gmail.com. Some clients (I tested Outlook\’s web interface and Yahoo!) even warn about this.

I looked at the headers GMail generates and, indeed, it leaves a clear trail in the following header sections:
Return-Path: <whateveruser@gmail.com>
….
Sender: whateveruser@gmail.com

That\’s too sad. They really did not need to do such crap, because they validate the email account belongs to you, before activating it and I do not think there were any security issues. Yet, apparently, Google tries to play safe… too bad :(

But, whatever inconvenience, it is hard to deny that this service is still pretty handy and nice and since it is free, we should not be complaining too much, anyway :)


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